Out of Africa, and into your hearts

DRACUT -- Soon, Theresa Boateng, the 15-year-old Ghanian girl living with two club feet, may be physically be able to jump for joy to express the emotion she's feeling now.

Thanks to many "amazingly generous" Sun readers who offered donations totaling several thousand dollars to pay for Theresa's airfare plus expenses, she may be boarding a flight from Africa, bound for a potentially life-changing operation in Boston, as early as this weekend, said Dr. Alena Ashenberg.

At least six people who read about Theresa's plight in Saturday's Sun offered to cover the girl's $1,200 airfare in its entirety, Ashenberg, a Dracut pediatrician, reported. Also, the Dracut Rotary Club came forward to donate a wheelchair for Theresa's use for after the surgery is performed at Boston Children's Hospital.

Dr. Alena Ashenberg holds a photo of 15-year-old Theresa Boateng who will soon travel here to have her club feet surgically repaired. SUN/David H. Brow

"The (reader) response was so amazingly generous and wonderfu," said Ashenberg. "I had so many people offer to give so much money that I had to ask people to hold back until I got an estimate from Children's Hospital on the follow-up medications that she may need."

"I think the people, when they read Theresa's story, thought about it just like I did when I first came across it: How unfair for this 15-year-old girl to have to live like that," the doctor added.

Ashenberg, a 28-year pediatrician with a reputation for passionately caring for all her child patients, first learned of the girl's condition -- a rarity for a teenager in the modern world -- from Theresa's older sister, Gifty Boateng of Lowell, whose three young children are Ashenberg's patients.

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In the two years since, Ashenberg actively worked through professional, diplomatic and charitable channels to find a way to get Boateng to the United States for corrective surgery that, due to Theresa's age, was too complicated to be done in Ghana.

In March, Children's Hospital Boston's chief orthopedic surgeon, Dr. James Kasser, one of the world's foremost surgical experts on lower-body extremities, offered to perform the surgery that will be fully paid for by CHB's "Children's Free Service Program," allocated annually to selected international and domestic patients.

All that stands between Theresa Boateng, 15, of Ghana, and life-changing foot surgery, is about $1,200 for airfare thanks to her sister and a local pediatrician. courtesy photo

To obtain the necessary visa from the Ghanian government to allow the trip, Westford immigration attorney Maria Santos, U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas and missionary Ghanian medical Dr. Vincent Waite of the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center all teamed up on Theresa's behalf.

By Thanksgiving, the only obstacle that remained was the expensive airfare to get Theresa from one continent to the other. It was beyond the resources of Gifty Boateng, who is employed as a custodian.

That obstacle has now been removed, Ashenberg happily reported on Wednesday.

"Gifty told me Theresa doesn't need any advance warning for (the trip). She'll be ready to go, and she may fly here as early as Saturday," said Ashenberg. "Theresa is very excited. She's really looking forward to this."

Theresa will stay at her sister's residence in Lowell during her post-op rehabilitation period, Gifty Boateng said.

Most of the readers who gave money toward Boateng's trip asked to remain anonymous, said Ashenberg. The donors, some of whom first contacted The Sun, included the owners of a local landscaping company and a Lowell-area couple whose children's most inspirational schoolteacher is a native of Ghana, they said.

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